This evening he did not feel so contented as usual: his ears seemed still to tingle from those blows at the hand of a child. He liked old Greek and Latin authors, and when the day was done liked to sit and read of a summer evening under the biggest yew upon his lawn, with the lowing of the cattle, the song of the nightingale, and the cries of the water-birds the only sounds upon the quiet air. But this evening his favorite philosophers said nothing to him: had Plato or any one of them ever had his ears boxed by a little fury of a strolling dancer?
The little fury, meanwhile, was dancing the saltarello with her brother before a crazy old wooden inn in Dartmouth,—dancing it as the girls do under the cork-trees in Sardinia, and under the spreading oaks of the Marches, and so pleasing the yokels of the river town with her grace and fire and animation that the pence rolled in by scores into her tambourine, and the mistress of the poor little inn said to her, “Nay, my pretty, as you have gained them here you must spend them here, and it is market-day to-morrow.”
Gemma was quite happy to have gained so much, and she got a modest little supper for Nonno, and as she shook down all her dark gold hair in the moonlight and looked on the water rippling away past the walls of the old castle she laughed out, though she was all alone, thinking of the grave gentleman on the gray horse, and murmured naughtily to herself, “I hope I did hurt him! Oh, I hope I hurt him!”
Then she knew she ought not to hope that, and kissed the Madonnina that hung at her throat, and asked the Holy Mother’s pardon, and then laid herself down on the little hard bed and went as sound asleep as a flittermouse in winter-time.
The next day was market-day in the little sleepy Old-World town upon the Dart, where the ships and the boats go by on the gray sea and the brown river-water. There would be watermen and countrymen, both, in numbers, farmers and fisherfolk, millers and cider-merchants, peddlers and hucksters, and egg-wives and wagoners, and Nonno was early awakened by the children, who were eager to begin getting more pence with the sunrise: the pence when they were made had such a terrible knack of flying away again. Gemma believed that they grew wings like the butterflies, though she never could see them, and though she and Nonno kept such close watch and ward over them.
They made themselves as spruce as they could for the day. Gemma had washed her white bodice and Bindo’s white shirt, and, though the scarlet and the blue and the yellow had got stained and weather-worn, the clothes yet were picturesque, and with their curling hair, and their beautiful big black eyes, and their cheeks as warm and as soft as peaches, she and Bindo were a pretty sight as they bent and swayed and circled and moved, now so slowly, now so furiously, in the changes of the saltarello, whilst their grandfather played for them on a little wooden flute, and Gemma beat her tambourine high above her auburn head, and, as the music waxed faster and the dance wilder, sprang and whirled and leaped and bounded for all the world, the people said, like the jack-o’-lantern that flashes over the bogs of Dartmoor.
They danced, with pauses for rest between their dances, all the day long; and when they were so very tired that they could dance no more, Nonno began his simple tricks with his thimble and peas, his wooden cups, and his little tray full of cards. They were innocent tricks, and when he told fortunes by the cards (which Gemma expounded to whosoever would pay a penny to hear the future) he dealt out fate so handsomely that such a destiny was very cheap indeed at four farthings.
The country-folks were pleased and content to have a gilt coach and horses and all manner of good luck promised them over the cards, and the youths liked to look at pretty Gemma, who was so unlike the maidens they picked apples with, or sold pilchards to, in their green Devon; and so the day wore merrily on apace, and the afternoon sun was slanting towards its setting over the Cornish shores and Cornish seas far away to the westward, when all in a moment there was a shout of “Police! Police!” and the good-humored crowd hustled together and made way, and two constables with wooden truncheons, saying never a word, marched up to the poor little tray-table, swept off it cards and coins and conjuring toys, and arrested poor old trembling Nonno in the sacred name of the Law!
Nonno began to scream a million words to a minute, but, alas! they were all Italian words, nobody understood one of them. Bindo sobbed, and Gemma, standing a moment transfixed with horror, flew upon the constable who had taken her poor old grandfather and bit his arm till the blood spurted. Mad with pain, the constable seized her, not gently, and clutched Bindo by the collar with his other hand. There was no possibility of resistance; Gemma fought, indeed, like a little polecat, but the men were too strong for her; they soon took her away through the crowd on the same road that Nonno was taking peaceably, and when the crowd muttered a little at its play being thus spoiled, the constables only said, gruffly, “Get you out of the way, or ye’ll be clapped in jail too, maybe; thimble-rigging, card-sharping, posturing, gambling, swindling,—why, this old dodger will have a month of treadmill if he have a day!”
And the crowd said among itself that to be sure the old fellow was a foreigner, it would not do to get into trouble about him, and most likely he only made believe to know the future; so left him to himself, and went to the alehouses and consoled themselves for his misfortunes in draughts of cider.